Did the roadblocks designed to limit the material to adults
foil them? Hardly.

"It's not very hard at all," says Chad Peiken. "I can get on
there right now. I know the address."

Sen. Exon's crusade

And that has Democratic Sen. J. James Exon of Nebraska mighty
upset. "This is the sickest stuff I've ever seen," he says,
while leafing through a blue book of what he considers
particularly egregious examples of cyberporn.

Called by Exon the "samples of shame," the three-ring binder
kept in his ornate Capitol office is Exon's exhibit A in the
fight to keep filth off the Web.

"This is far more than pinups," says Exon. "It is the most
far-reaching, despicable pornography from sick minds that are
being spread pretty much at will to kids."

Exon is one of the authors of the Communications Decency Act,
a law to regulate the Internet that was declared
unconstitutional by a federal judge. The law is now headed
for the Supreme Court.

"We are convinced the Supreme Court will not take a much more
judicial approach, and not be bamboozled," Exon predicts.

Exon's law makes it illegal to transmit indecent words or
pictures to children over the Internet. "I'm worried about my
grandkids, and I'm worried about other people's kids."

Legal Pandora's box

But keeping tabs on the Internet is virtually impossible, and
trying to regulate it opens up a legal Pandora's box pitting
First Amendment rights against public decency.

"You can't regulate it," says Chad Peiken. "And if a child of
15 or 16 wants to find it, they can find it one way or
another."

We asked Chad and Matt to try to connect to the Web site for
Playboy magazine, which is relatively mild. Access to racier
material is restricted to those over 18.

But the boys were able to avoid this roadblock simply by
typing in a fake birthdate.

Playboy concedes it's possible for underage teens to tap into
its site, but the publicly traded Chicago-based media company
doesn't want to hamper a business that has a great deal of
potential.

'Playboy owns the Internet'

Kent says she expects the Web to be a leading source of
income for Playboy by the end of the decade. "Our advertisers
are extremely happy with the results they've had as a result
of being on the Playboy Web page. And it's because of this
incredible amount of traffic we get."

If Playboy is a problem for some politicians, Elf Sternberg
is a nightmare. From small kitchen in a tiny apartment in a
modest Seattle neighborhood, Sternberg manages the most
popular news group on the Internet: "alt.sex."

"People started asking me for advice, and I started giving
it. I developed a reputation as somebody who knew what they
were talking about."

Operating what could be described as the Dear Abby of
cybersex, Sternberg has drawn some 300,000 computer users in
just three months.

Unlike Playboy, he makes no money for his effort. He makes a
living as a computer programmer. His "alt.sex" site is fairly
technical, with lots of "how to" stuff, and therein lies much
of its appeal.

Not surprisingly, Elf agrees with the bulk of Internet
experts who believe that any attempt to keep kids away from
adult sites on the Web is doomed to fail.

"People who are creating it are several steps ahead of the
people who want to control it," he says.

He cites the word "breast," which was banned by America
Online as part of a group of sexually oriented words as part
of an effort to deter potentially offensive language.

AOL did a quick-about face after news groups for breast
cancer, patients and other sites were back in business.

"It's unenforceable," says Sternberg. "You would have to
shut down the 'Net."

The futility of restricting language over the Internet is
obvious for Chad and Matt. "Instead of writing sex, which
they have banned, you can write XXX," he notes.

Restricting obscenity on the Internet is a conundrum simply
because of the sheer nature of the medium. Just about anybody
can put any kind of pornography on a home page.

There are some new products that are supposed to block access
to sites that parents find objectionable. But, as Exon notes,
blocking devices "become obsolete almost as fast as they're
put in place."

Certainly, the best way to keep tabs on what goes over the
Internet is supervision. "The only way to ensure that a kid
doesn't get into something that's really inappropriate is for
a parent to be in the room," says Playboy's Kent.

But the Internet is growing at a tremendous rate. There were
about one million sites in 1993, and today there are about 12
million, with predictions of 25 million a year from now.

That means it's getting increasingly difficult for parents to
monitor their children's viewing at all times."The reality
is, if it doesn't happen in your house, they're going to go
over to somebody else's house, and they're going to get
access there," says Sara Peiken, Chad and Matt's mother,

Perhaps the only real way to address the issue is for people
-- including teen-agers -- to police the Internet themselves.
Says Marv Peiken, the father of the boys: "If they can make
their own decisions, then we're going to have kids who are
ready for the world."